16 July 2021 3 minute read
What we did
- We’re continuing to gather data about the app from young people, and soon we’ll be able to start synthesising and analysing the interviews and looking for key themes.
What we’re thinking about
When we asked young people if they had any ideas about how to advertise the app, quite a few suggested putting adverts in physical spaces that young people frequently use, such as bus stops. To build on that, we’re thinking of creating a bus advert with a QR code that young people can scan, which would take them to the app. We could implement a different set of analytics for this ‘real-world’ user testing and see whether young people would use the app from a bus stop and, if so, how they would use it. If we find that 90% of young people go onto the app, look through it for 10 seconds and then click off, that data would be useful for us, even if we don’t necessarily know why they’re clicking off.
We’ve also considered how to tackle the data architecture challenge. We know that many organisations across the UK are creating and maintaining databases of the support available to young people. This is resource-intensive and could lead to lots of duplication. A few weeks ago, we spoke to similar apps in this space, as well as our Steering Group, about how they tackle this challenge and whether there is a role for digital collaboration to reduce duplication. We’re hoping to arrange follow-up conversations with each organisation to maintain these relationships.
We have also connected to Open Referral and Open Referral UK to explore how we might be able to fit into their existing work—an open data standard to ensure organisations are able to combine data sets more easily. This is the start of an ongoing conversation, and we would love to hear from anyone working in this space.
Challenges
As our interviews with young people have continued, we’ve realised that we’ve focused a lot on learning about the product (namely, whether young people like the app), but we now also need to address how we might learn about the process. This would involve asking young people who were involved in the development of the app what they got out of the process. To address this, we’ve drafted a survey for our Young Person Steering Group, as well as the user testers and our wider charity Steering Group. The questions are currently in review.
We want to ask those who have been involved in My Best Life what the process has meant for them, as well as consider within the team what it has meant for our other projects. We’ll share some of that learning in a separate blog post.
